Update on National Healthcare Identifiers Service
1 June 2010: Legislation currently before Federal Parliament is set to formalise the introduction of Australia’s national Healthcare Identifiers Service. In November 2009, NEHTA released the first in a series of technical specifications for software companies wishing to access the national numbering system.
In March 2010, the HI Service operator Medicare Australia published a second release and provided a platform for software vendors to begin testing the ability of their applications to connect with the HI Service.
The next round of technical specifications can only be published by Medicare once the Healthcare Identifiers Bill 2010 and associated Regulations have passed through Parliament. At that stage, Medicare Australia will have the details necessary to confirm requirements and make final specifications available to the software industry.
The first two specification releases were intended to help software vendors familiarise themselves with the HI Service’s technical and design requirements, so they could begin planning changes to their products. It was not expected that vendors would begin product upgrades until a final HI specification was released. Possible amendments to the Regulations, resulting from extensive public consultation, means the third HI Service specification may include requirements that differ from those contained in earlier releases.
Clearly, some vendors may choose to begin integrating the HI Service into their products before any final specification is published. This is a commercial decision based on whether or not vendors perceive the benefits of early adoption outweigh the risk of rework if specifications change. Each vendor is likely to make this decision in partnership with their key customers. If a customer decides to plan for early integration of the HI Service, their preferred vendor will necessarily be an integral part of this process.
It is acknowledged that vendors need adequate time to make product changes and most work to a standard product development lifecycle of approximately six months.
Once vendors have received final technical specifications, and updated their products, the software will need to be assessed for conformance. This will comprise a two stage process. Initially, conformance testing is based on Medicare Australia operating an integration test platform which checks that the medical software system is able to access the HI Service and does not pose any security risk to the service environment.
In addition, software behaviour will also need to be assessed because the manner in which applications use, manage and display healthcare identifier information can increase clinical safety, security and privacy risks and undermine the benefits of the HI Service.
Conformity assessment parameters and testing tools are currently being developed by NEHTA, for consultation with industry, and will be finalised once the HI Legislation and Regulations are in place.
The assessment and testing process itself is expected to be operated by established, independent industry bodies, such as NATA-accredited test laboratories, with vendors able to access this service by early 2011.